Commissioning and producing new works are long-standing traditions at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park with 90 world premieres produced to date and more than 25 new play commissions. Made in Cincy: New Works Festival further elevates that commitment with an exciting annual event that will illuminate the creative process for audiences by inviting them to witness, participate in and champion the creation of new American plays and musicals.
Made in Cincy: New Works Festival will pilot this spring during the week of May 4, with public readings and events on May 8 and 9, 2026. The artists, and their plays in development, and a schedule of public events are listed below.
The festival will officially launch in the fall around the commissioned world premiere of Talk by nationally known playwright and Cincinnati native Theresa Rebeck. Development work with artists will take place in the week of September 28, culminating in a public schedule of events on October 3 and 4, 2026. The fall artists and schedule will be announced at a later date.
RESERVATIONS OPEN ON APRIL 1.
All public events are free, but reservations are required. Events will take place in one of the rehearsal studios at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in Mt Adams, 962 Mt. Adams Circle, unless otherwise noted.
Staged reading and post‑show discussion with the playwright.
Staged reading and post‑show discussion with the playwright.
Festival Panel Discussion with playwrights Nathan Alan Davis, Maggie Lou Radar and Isaiah Reaves. Followed by Happy Hour.
Staged reading and post‑show discussion with the playwright.
Co-commissioned by Indiana Repertory Theatre and the Playhouse’s Jerome Fey Endowment for New Plays
In antebellum Cincinnati, the Fugitive Slave Act tightens its grip and Zavia shelters eleven fugitive children in her home on the edge of the Ohio River, praying faith will hold where law has failed. Her beliefs become a battleground when a white bounty hunter arrives, her estranged husband returns hardened by violence and her son Asa refuses to meet cruelty with force. Surrounded by danger and guided by three formidable elder women, Zavia must decide what faith demands when mercy and survival are no longer aligned. Written in searing verse and shot through with dark humor, Ohio River Prayers is a tragic, urgent reckoning with resistance, inheritance and the unbearable cost of choosing how to fight.
Three girls grow up to become young women in rural, turn of the 21st century, Sleeper, Oklahoma. They navigate friendship, faith, sexuality and danger in a town where hypocrisy is inherited and silence is survival. Spanning childhood through adolescence, the play tracks how the girls are shaped by institutions meant to protect them: church, family, school and law. Ferociously funny and devastatingly honest, The Church of Broken Things captures the raw confusion of girlhood in a world that demands purity while excusing harm. A coming-of-age story about belief as refuge and weapon, and the fierce bond that forms when girls refuse to look away.
Commissioned by the Playhouse’s Jerome Fey Endowment for New Plays
New Orleans, 1959. Christmas Eve. One lavish mink coat and far too many people who want it. When Wyatt, a young Black playwright and occasional escort, is gifted a stunning mink by a powerful white mayoral candidate, a simple goodbye spirals into a razor-sharp farce about secrecy, desire and survival in the Jim Crow South. As the coat changes hands, chaos erupts: a crumbling political campaign, a meddling sister-in-law, a conniving fiancée, a hysterical son and a web of lies that can longer hold. With fast-paced dialogue, bold characters, and a little ancestral magic, this is a play about claiming your dignity —even when the world insists you give it back.
Nathan Alan Davis is a playwright and screenwriter based in New York and Boston. His writing for the stage includes The Refuge Plays (Roundabout Theatre/NYTW), Nat Turner in Jerusalem (NYTW), The High Ground (Arena Stage), Eternal Life Part 1 (Wilma Theater), Origin Story (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park), The Wind and the Breeze (Cygnet Theatre), and Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere). For his body of work, Nathan has received a Windham-Campbell Prize (2021), a Steinberg Playwright Award (2020), and a Whiting Award in Drama (2018). His TV/film work includes projects for Netflix, AMC, BET, and Paramount. He is the Director of the MFA Playwriting Program at Boston University.
An award-winning playwright and AEA actor, Maggie Lou Rader tells epic stories about epic women. After growing up in rural southwest Oklahoma, she attended William Jewell College, Oxford University, and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Her work has been seen off-Broadway in New York, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles, and on Tony Award-winning stages. She’s won the Theater J Patty Abramson Jewish Play Prize with Theatre J in DC and the Notre Dame College New Play Festival and was selected for Utah Shakespeare Festival’s Words Cubed Program and Red Bull Theater’s New Short Play Festival. She’s been a finalist for the Henley Rose Playwrighting Award for Women, Central Florida Community Arts New Play Festival, twice for the Lanford Wilson Festival, a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Road Theater Summer Playwrights Festival, the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, Dayton Playhouse’s Future Fest, and UP Theater's Renewal Reading Series. Her work has been developed at DePaul University, Human Race Theatre, Inkwell Theatre, Skeleton Rep, and Occasional Drawl Productions and seen at Know Theatre, InBocca Performance, Commonwealth Theatre Center, The Marsh, Eclectic Full Contact Theatre, Idaho Shakespeare, Urban Stages, Theatre Pro Rata, and colleges from coast to coast.
Isaiah Reaves is an emerging young playwright whose work explores a spectrum of Black and Queer experiences. A native of Cincinnati, he graduated cum laude from Northern Kentucky University in 2020. His plays have been commissioned and staged by Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and many others. Isaiah has received five Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. He is also a semi-finalist for the Ucross and The Blank Theatre Future of Playwriting Prize, a 2020 finalist of the Jackie Demaline Regional Collegiate Playwriting Competition, an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a recipient of a Cincinnati CityBeat Critic’s Pick.
NANCY AND MARK DAWES
